The transition between faith to no faith.

[Whateverist]

I suspect the younger you are, the easier it is to get out. In first grade I would throw every other fritos corn chip over my shoulder for Jesus on the way home from school. In second grade I would have said anyone who didn't love Jesus was an ingrate. In early elementary school I used to imagine spending all eternity with Jesus who I thought of as someone who would know and do the best/right thing in any situation. My mission, as I defined it for myself, was to learn to do the best thing myself .. mostly in an empathetic way. I wanted to be worthy of His company and I imagined He'd be tired of sycophants who only made Him feel lonely. In my there by herself. By fifth grade I had started to suspect I was just talking to myself when I would ask for some sort of sign if He really was there. I didn't talk about it with anyone else. I thought I might be the only one narcissistic hubris, I wanted to be the Guy's peer.

I had the luxury of figuring it out for myself because my god-obsessed father was in the navy and my mother wasn't dragging all seven of us since everyone around me talked of god and crazy woo stuff like it was as real as mowing the lawn.

If you make it to adulthood going to a church where people are actively guiding your belief system that's got to be harder. If you read the bible and spend time defending it that would make it harder still. If you reach the point where you're proselytizing and engaging in apologetics, that probably makes it about as hard to leave religion as it is for a gang member who had been required to kill someone to join a gang.

But who knows. Everyone's experience is unique I suppose. It is hard to know for sure what its really like for anyone else. But having trained for the olympics of empathy in order to be God's buddy, I often think I know how others feel. Narcissism sucks .. but not as bad as its polar opposite, low self esteem.